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Register food guru Jennifer Miller lists the things she won’t give up in the year to come

Frankly, New Year’s resolutions seem like just another opportunity for disappointment. The weight not lost, the more-veg-less-wine plan down the tubes, the uncleaned junk drawers still stuffed with crap that seems to arrive unbidden and unbought. (Where do all those little black binder clips come from, anyway? Dozens of them, in all sizes. Don’t even get me started on the chalk nubbins and push pins.)

Call me a glass-half-empty girl, but — OK there is no but. Whether the glass is half empty or half full it has the same amount, right? And I’m pretty sure there’s an animal-themed meme about filling it up with more wine or whiskey that backs me up.

So what are we devout cynics — we doubters, we scoffers, we leather-hided, wooden-headed, crabby-panted sourpusses — doing with this dumb tradition of listing our future failures at the beginning of each year?

Here’s what I’m going to do — the rest of you are on your own: In the (entirely lackluster) spirit expected of me and my harrumphing ilk, I offer you, my cheerful, life-loving readers who always dance while I sit it out (man, I hate that song), my 2014 anti-resolutions.

Naturally, they’re all built around food — which has become, for good or for ill, my journalistic calling card. How else would thee know me?

I will not, ever, order anything that contains the words “red velvet.”

I will not stop cutting/printing out recipes for coconut cakes and elaborate Indian food, both of which I love and neither of which I make.

My accordion file stuffed full of recipes contains so many of these I could very well have the world’s most complete archive of such things. I have no explanation for this penchant and no reason to give it up. I mean, what’s it to you?

I will not, in 2014, or any other year for that matter, get over the fact that so many people even consider cooking without wine and olive oil. And that margarine continues to even be a thing.

And because I’m not all bad, I will, at last,offer you some food for thought — snark-free.

I will not buy meat or eggs from huge factory farms or trucked-in produce when I can buy it from someone right here. It’s a small thing in the face of our massive and massively broken and untenable food system, but we all have our uncrossable lines and this is mine.

Des Moines, Iowa, is a sophisticated place in the heart of an incredibly bountiful chunk of land at the center of the richest country in a world with unprecedented access to knowledge and technology.

I’m not much of a banner-waver by nature, but this last year and a half on the job has been an eye-opener. I’ve met people who have, with no assurance of reward (or even a decent living), committed to doing things — cooking, planting, husbandry, processing — in a healthy and sustainable and, not incidentally, delicious ways.

I’ve visited places where you could bite into a dirt-covered carrot and find it delicious, where you could look a cow in the eye without guilt, where chefs and ice-cream makers and pizza bakers and wine purveyors will look you in the eye without guilt. I’ve visited some places that evoke that supremely hyperbolic “Field of Dreams” line about Iowa being heaven.

And it might still be possible to make it so, even by the things we will not do in 2014.